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Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

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Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#81

Post by WalterBright »

dang wrote: post #8

(I'm a mod here) It's true that this place can be cryptic, and that has downsides—specifically, it can be confusing to newcomers, even to some newcomers who would make ideal HN users. That sucks. But there's a key that unlocks most of the puzzles. That is to understand that we're optimizing for exactly one thing: curiosity. (Specifically, intellectual curiosity, since there are other kinds of curiosity too.) Here are…

Thank you, dang. Your forum is the best one on the internet, and it's in no small part thanks to your moderation efforts.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#82

Post by Animats »

It works because it discusses important things that are of interest to reasonably smart people. The top 5 items right now.

- Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice

Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans.

- What Is an Elliptic Curve?

A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped.

- Learn Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Only HN would put something like this near the top of of the forum.

- Gemini 3 Flash: Frontier intelligence built for speed

This week in LLMs. Have to keep up.

- OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer

They're using Apple's Metal for talking to the GPU? How does portability work? OBS runs on Linux and Windows, too, but Metal runs only on Apple machines.

These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#83

Post by keiferski »

lukan wrote: post #79
keiferski wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YouTube is easily the best “social network” in terms of having high-quality content with minimal manipulation. And I definitely consider it my main form of media consumption. You just have to curate your feed and add stuff to playlists, not watch whatever is on the logged-out default home page.

What? You have to do a lot of curation and fighting the service itself (hiding shorts) to get to a bearable level. And I did not spend hours clicking things I don't like. I mostly just watch movies/clips I want, but my recommendations are full of clickbait manipulative garbage. So yes, one can find jewels in it - but only if digging through the garbage first.

I watch a ton of great content by people that I subscribe to. It's not difficult or complicated to get there.

Not sure what else to say.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#84

Post by d--b »

Ok. So you'd like to promote: https://www.legitcontrol.com/ (at least you'll get your link in one comment here, no need to thank me ;-))

A system that somehow allows you to tame AI agents' unruly use of git (is that it?)

I see you did use Show HN, and that didn't work.

What you could have done is email hn@ycombinator.com telling them that your Show HN is not being upvoted. This happens, and usually dang and others mod will take a look and if you're within the guidelines will give it a small boost so it shows up in the main Show HN page. Then you're on your own.

Make sure your catchphrase, or hook is well written, cause most people here will not read past "Make Agents a Safe Collaborator in your App".

Anyways, as others said here. There are no ways to "game" HN. the closest you will manage is what you just did, basically asking for help...

That's the key, ask for help, and people will respond. People are nice, and they are willing to procrastinate their intellect away for free.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#85

Post by retsibsi »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #18

The algorithm was shared in the past. The scoring is pretty simple tbh - the older it is, the less score - the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score - penalties reduce the score ( eg. By moderator) How it works for the end-user: - People browsing in newest, make it visible in the main page. - Most people see the main page Result: interesting topics go to the main page

> the more votes and comments it has, the higher the score

Unless this has changed, I don't think comments contribute positively to the score. Apparently they (used to?) contribute negatively if there are more comments than upvotes and the number of comments exceeds some threshold. See e.g. this very old article: https://www.righto.com/2013/11/how-hacker-news-ranking-reall...

> In order to prevent flamewars on Hacker News, articles with "too many" comments will get heavily penalized as "controversial". In the published code, the contro-factor function kicks in for any post with more than 20 comments and more comments than upvotes. Such an article is scaled by (votes/comments)^2. However, the actual formula is different - it is active for any post with more comments than upvotes and at least 40 comments. Based on empirical data, I suspect the exponent is 3, rather than 2 but haven't proven this.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#86

Post by lukan »

Animats wrote: post #82

It works because it discusses important things that are of interest to reasonably smart people. The top 5 items right now. - Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve tumor elimination in mice Ah, progress on cancer. But in mice, where lots of things work but don't transfer to humans. - What Is an Elliptic Curve? A core concept in modern cryptography which I don't understand. The article helped. - Learn Egypt…

"These are all interesting things, but they are not popular things. Or even commercially interesting things."

I would argue Gemini is popular and commercially interesting, but yes, mainly it is a curious topic, whether one is invested in the current hype, or not.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#87

Post by Kaibeezy »

Imustaskforhelp wrote: post #68
fzeindl wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously all of what dang said, but I want to add that I think timing is an additional factor. If you post when silicon valley wakes up on a weekday, you might get “initial” points faster, which leads to your submission being ranked higher up for a while and being more discoverable.

Interesting stuff but we should keep these secrets otherwise people will try to game this system :)

That (\/) (;,,;) (\/) I’m helping! feeling upon discovering a mod has bumped one of your 04:00 UTC “oh, this is interesting” posts that nobody else saw.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#88

Post by npodbielski »

asim wrote: post #76

To echo what dang said in the thread. It's a place to hang out and learn about new things. Or sometimes old things. It's news, it's history. All with a tech skew. I've had this account since 2008. In that time I've used it in many different ways, including getting stuff onto the front page. Honestly trying to game it doesn't work. Post something people genuinely find interesting and it will make it to the front page…

HN is great for that stuff. Though I genuinely lack a good site with just developers news. HN is not that. I was using Code Project for that but it gone bankrupt. Other dev news sites seems to be closer to facebook with AI generated articles than to actual interesting development stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Does anyone understand how Hacker News works?

#89

Post by jacquesm »

esperent wrote: post #80
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #6

> " When working on my projects and talking to investors, I often hear: 'Just post it on Hacker News or Reddit and show that people love it.' " ... " If so, what are the real levers, and what do people consistently misunderstand? " There are no "levers". People come to HN to discuss nerdy topics and those that have come to HN to help make those discussions more informed and interesting are welcome. Anyone who comes t…

> There are no "levers". Everyone wants to believe that their community doesn't have levers. But this is just wishful thinking, ego talking. Of course HN has levers, of course the community here can be manipulated. The easiest way I can see would be to frame a helpful, curious question to which your service just happens to be the answer. So then you most an Ask HN like "can anyone help me to understand why people do…

This says more about you than about HN I think.

Obviously anything can be manipulated, but HN has been remarkably resilient and if there is one thing the collective here is good at then it is at spotting patterns, even over a longer period of time. And once your business is banned from here there isn't really a way back in.

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